So, Cook turned to an old friend, Matt Wells, who has worked since 2000 to develop the Gigablast search engine in Albuquerque, for help. Wells showed him, by digging deep in the data, that a rival site was getting tons of traffic via inbound links.

“Oh, that’s why they’re beating us,” Cook said.

Then Cook realized other companies could use the Gigablast data, too, for their own SEO.

For more than a decade, Wells has been working to optimize Gigablast. It never took off because of Google’s dominance in the market.

But it’s a potentially powerful search engine that has a similar algorithm to Google’s.

So, Cook said, he licensed the Gigablast engine and its data. Instead of trying to build a better Google, Gigablast is trying to be just like Google in how it searches. Cook says his new company ProCog is able to sell the data Gigablast creates.

Cook, who is also a special projects manager at Technology Ventures Corp., said the comparison reports ProCog can generate from the data can help SEO pros figure out which inbound links, or keywords, are getting traction and which aren’t.

Most SEO companies can give a site operator link analysis, but they can’t tell you which links actually matter, he says.

“We can tell you that to move up in the ranking you need to have an inbound link from a 12-rated site. And, by the way, here are 10 12-rated sites,” Cook said. “Google cannot do the same thing. They can’t give away their algorithm or people would manipulate it.”

So far, Cook has indexed a fraction of the pages that Google does, running about 270 computers in a warehouse off the Pan American Freeway. He’s looking for about $1 million in venture capital that could fund more computers, and more bandwidth, to index millions more pages.

ProCog will start selling the service at $79 a month, allowing customers to monitor 15 to 20 keywords, and five sites, as well as providing competitor data.

And now, Cook said, Cheatcodes.com is back as Google’s No. 2 search result for “cheat codes.”